


missives from the dog park

by patho (ghostsoldier)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Backstory, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-11-11
Packaged: 2017-12-21 22:43:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/905824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostsoldier/pseuds/patho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of ficlets that needed a home. Current listing:</p><p>- tea and sympathy (Old Woman Josie, the Sheriff)<br/>- outliers (Carlos-centric)<br/>- catalogue (Carlos/Cecil)<br/>- delta wave (Carlos/Cecil)<br/>- cacti (Young Woman Josie)</p><p>Tags updated as I add things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. tea and sympathy

Can you imagine the Sheriff finally showing up at Old Woman Josie’s, because she insists on talking about the angels even though it’s forbidden and it’s putting him and the Secret Police in kind of a weird position with regard to the City Council? Josie opens the door before he’s even halfway up the walk and looks him up and down and frowns, and finally she’s like, “Well, I guess you might as well come in."

The angels are playing Jenga in the sitting room, and he studiously pretends he doesn’t see or hear them as he trails Josie inside, watches her bustle around the kitchen fixing iced tea for each of them. There’s a little dish of strawberry candies on the white linoleum table; it gives him a weird pang because it’s the exact same dish it was forty years ago, when he was just a kid going door to door selling weird rocks and old bones he found out by the quarry.

He could make Josie disappear.

They both know this.

And Josie sets his tea on the table in front of him and cocks her head like an inquisitive owl staring down a mouse, and the Sheriff feels like he’s twelve again.

"We need to talk," he says.

Josie just eases herself into her chair and clucks her tongue. “Drink your tea, Ronnie."

No one’s called him “Ronnie" in thirty years.

Ronnie drinks his tea.

Eventually, he eats one of the strawberry candies too. The goo inside tastes like the way plastic smells, but it’s _sweet_ ; it sticks in the crevices of his teeth and he tongues irritably at it and can’t for the life of him remember why he’d stopped by.

There’s a crash from the other room. Someone mutters, “Drat. Best out of five."

"I hope you remembered to put down a tablecloth, dears," Josie calls. The silence immediately after is crowded and guilty, and followed by the sound of several people frantically whispering to each other before someone apparently scrambles for the linen closet. Josie just smiles and shakes her head, finishes her own drink before reaching for Ronnie’s empty glass.

"They’re good boys and girls," she says, “but sometimes a bit forgetful. Now, what brings you by to visit a little old woman?"

And Ronnie, feeling fuzzy and pleasant, full of the best iced tea in three counties and surrounded by the warm, comforting kitchen smell of his childhood, blinks a few times behind his dark glasses and says, slowly, “Just wanted to see how you were getting on, is all."

"Well!" Josie beams. “Isn’t that nice? I’m doing just fine, as you can see. Come on, then, I’ll walk you to the door."

So she walks him out and tucks some butterscotch hard candies in his pocket “for later" and waves at him from the porch steps as he heads back down the walk, and the Sheriff tips his broad-brimmed hat and tells her to have a nice night, and the report he files later that evening says nothing but, “Everything’s hunky-dory."

His Secret Police don’t ask. They all have their own little collection of strawberry candies and butterscotch, sitting in the paperclip holders on their desks.


	2. outliers

Carlos as a child, watching old monster movies with his grandparents. Eyes wide and rapt behind his new glasses, shoveling handfuls of popcorn into his mouth as he watches men in white lab coats scheme to save the world. Tomorrow, the glasses will be broken for the first of many times. Carlos is an anomaly, small and dark-skinned, soft where his classmates are bright and hard. They have nannies; Carlos lives with his grandparents. They trade baseball cards; Carlos shyly befriends the school librarian. His brand-new glasses are broken, once, twice, too many times to count, and Carlos trudges home with skinned palms and ripped clothes, aching with something he can’t name. He loses himself in celluloid, and dreams of being a hero.

Carlos as a teenager, gorging on books about physics and quantum mechanics and obscure mathematics, scrabbling for the seams of the universe so he can blow it wide open. Carlos grows into his body, but never his brain. Always an anomaly, always an outlier, an endless game of catch-up where he doesn’t know the rules. He reads science fiction by flashlight, Ellison and Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, dreams about the sky overhead and the earth beneath his feet. Hungry and desperate for something he can never quite explain. All he knows is it’s always just beyond his reach.

Carlos as an undergrad, arguing hypotheses and theories into the early hours of the morning, kissing and being kissed, fucking and being fucked, furiously quantifying the world in a language he can understand and laughing with relief when it finally consents to be quantified. He still reads science fiction, still watches his old movies, but guiltily. The longing they inspire is something blurry and imprecise, and he has bigger things to be concerned with now: grad school, and research, and funding. The anger and the old, furious shame that burns when he goes into an interview, with his new suit and his new haircut, and pinpoints the exact second he’s written off as a diversity candidate. Top of his class, already published. Still an abnormality.

Carlos in grad school, slogging his way through one PhD and then two. Teaching classes in between research and falling asleep at his desk, waking hollow and bleary-eyed with long-forgotten memories of childhood swirling in the back of his mind. Without knowing why, he digs out his Ellison and his Bradbury, smiles at the dog-eared pages. He curls up on his battered couch. Makes popcorn. Watches men in white lab coats battle rubber monsters in the desert. On nights when he can’t sleep, which is most nights these days, he drives out to the airport to park his car on the bluff, where he reclines on the hood and lets his gaze go soft and pretends, for the first time in a very long time, that the lights overhead are something well beyond the familiar.

Carlos upon hearing the name “Night Vale” for the very first time, like a key fitting a lock he never knew he possessed. A tiny perfect click as the tumblers fall into place. He collects every scrap of paper he can get his hands on, every blurred or grainy video, every barely-there recording. He pins maps to the walls of his office and scrawls on them in red Sharpie, lives on takeout and forgets to cut his hair. He exults in the novelty of pushing at the universe and feeling it push _back_. After more than a year of preparation and planning and meticulous documentation, his proposals are finally ready. It’s all there in the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. A vortex, and an event horizon, and Night Vale, small and simple Night Vale, right at the center of it.

Carlos behind the wheel of his car with the windows down and the radio off, cresting the ridge just before the highway drops from the mesa into the valley. The sky overhead is vast and crowded, swarming with constellations. The air rushing past him is dry, cooler now the sun’s slid below the horizon, and it tastes of dust and sagebrush and stone, like his childhood and, improbably and impossibly, of _home_. It’s a word he gave up on a long time ago. But then the road dips and the valley opens like a night-blooming cereus and Night Vale is suddenly there, brilliant and fascinating and strange. Carlos pulls onto the shoulder and kills the headlights. Sits for a while, just watching. Something hard and knotted in his chest is slowly easing.

There's a brief burst of static from the radio, and in the ensuing quiet a low, smooth voice says, “Welcome.”

And Carlos smiles.


	3. catalogue

Carlos, at Cecil’s last count, has demonstrated at least four thousand, two hundred and eighty-seven unique and distinct facial expressions.

“I’m pretty sure I don't have that many,” Carlos says. They’re walking hand in hand through a stretch of scrubby desert that most _certainly_ isn’t the abandoned waterfront. For all that it’s an expensive and nonexistent shared citywide hallucination, it’s also rather pretty at this time of afternoon. Cecil didn’t have the heart to say no when Carlos suggested it. 

The look on Carlos’ face is Expression One Thousand, Two Hundred and Sixty-Three: Bemusement with Faint Overtones of Concern, Liberally Splashed with Embarrassment. It’s one Cecil’s quite familiar with. To the untrained eye it’s easily confused with Expression One Thousand, Two Hundred and Sixty- _Four_ : Amusement with Faint Overtones of Concern, Liberally Splashed with Embarrassment. An easy mistake if you’re one for mixing up “bemused” with “amused,” which Cecil most definitely is _not_. The difference is in the tilt of Carlos’ beautifully expressive eyebrows, in the tiny muscles around his eyes. Worry lines versus laugh lines. The indent of his brilliant white teeth against his lower lip. Whether he blinks quickly, a fast set of three like the flapping wings of a startled moth, or a long slow sweep of his lashes, like a satisfied cat showing its affection.

Expression One Thousand, Two Hundred and Sixty-Three slowly but surely eases into Expression Four Hundred and Twenty-One: Bewildered Fondness with Notes of Amusement and a Soupçon of Charm.

“I had no idea my blinking was so demonstrative,” Carlos says. “Did you realize you’re narrating?”

“Your eyelashes speak _volumes_ , Carlos,” Cecil says fervently. “They are thick, inky poetry. When they dip to touch the tops of your exquisitely elegant cheekbones, it’s like stanzas being inscribed on the unworthy vellum of my heart.” 

Red creeps into Carlos’ cheeks. The tips of his ears are the color of brick, and Cecil doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of Expression Two Thousand, Four Hundred and Seventy-Six, which is, in exactly two words, “mortified delight.” 

“My cheekbones aren’t exquisite,” Carlos mutters, “ _or_ elegant,” like he doesn’t believe Cecil at all but desperately wants to, and so Cecil pulls his hand away and cups Carlos’ face between his palms and tells him, very seriously, “You are the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met.”

“Oh,” Carlos says, his voice faint. This expression, too, is one Cecil will never tire of. It’s one of about thirty-five variants, and they all mean the same thing: Carlos is about to kiss him, quite thoroughly, and it’s going to be a while before they go anywhere.

*

He's not disappointed.

*

Some time later, far more flushed and in greater disarray than before, they continue their stroll. They’ll have to head back soon – Carlos may the town’s favorite scientist, but that won’t stop the sheriff’s secret police from leaving rather pointed notes in his car if he and Cecil stay out at the waterfront too long – but Carlos just tugs him over to the boardwalk the moment he begins to make vague noises about heading back.

“Just a minute,” he says. “It’s almost sunset.”

“How do you know?” Cecil asks. Carlos’ answering grin is six parts scientific glee, one part nihilism, and three parts sheer, unadulterated joy.

“I _don’t_ ,” he says. “Turns out? That’s what makes it amazing.” 

When the sun finally does dip below the mesa, Carlos wraps an arm around him, tucks a hand into his back pocket. The encroaching night gives teeth to the breeze coming off the desert, a bite it otherwise lacks during the sleepy heat of midday, but Cecil doesn't mind. It lifts Carlos’ hair off his forehead, leaving Cecil with a clear view of his strong profile and an expression he deeply treasures.

Expression Four Thousand, Two Hundred and Eighty-Seven. Soft and faraway, utterly content. 

The one that means, “I’m home.”


	4. delta wave

They sleep together long before they ever sleep together.

Because Carlos goes away in his head sometimes, and because time is meaningless in Night Vale anyway. He’ll latch onto a hypothesis, the faint stirrings of a theory, the glowing avenues of inquiry just begging to be followed to their inevitable conclusions. None of his clocks work right, and the sun never rises or sets at the correct time; it’s all too easy for him to ignore the slow and steady passing of the hours. Twenty-four, thirty-two, forty-eight, sixty. He dozes off during their first real dinner at Cecil’s apartment, and jolts awake to Cecil’s hand on his cheek. Cecil’s eyes, soft and luminous and worried.

“Carlos,” Cecil says slowly, “when did you last sleep?”

Carlos can’t remember, and it bothers him that he can’t remember, and instead of answering he mutters slurred apologies for ruining their date, all of which Cecil shushes immediately, first with a finger pressed to Carlos’ lips, then with his own mouth. It’s a gentle kiss, brimming with promise, with _care_.

“Come on,” Cecil says when he finally pulls away. “Dinner can wait.” He takes Carlos’ hands, and leads him down the hallway towards the bedroom.

Carlos drifts, in and out, as Cecil carefully strips him to his boxers and undershirt. His hands are warm, warms as his mouth was a moment ago, and he presses the occasional kiss to Carlos’ shoulder and the top of his head, neatly folds Carlos’ clothes and sets them aside on the big oak dresser. His bedroom is so normal it’s shocking: framed photographs, a rumpled bedspread, a few municipally-approved books on physics and seismology scattered here and there. The lamp on the bedside table is the ugliest thing Carlos has ever seen. Cecil’s toothpaste tastes of mint.

He’s almost entirely asleep by the time Cecil gets him tucked between sweet-smelling sheets, but when Cecil stands as if to leave, Carlos has the presence of mind to snag his sleeve. “Don’t,” he rasps.

Cecil pauses, one knee still dipping the edge of the mattress, his expression a mess of warmth and confusion and dawning hope.

“Don’t go,” Carlos says. “Please. Stay.”

The confusion clears from Cecil’s face, and what’s left behind is a look Carlos could happily see for the rest of his life and never tire of.

“All right,” Cecil says softly.

They discover that Cecil fits perfectly in the space between Carlos’ arms, that the backs of his knees are the perfect slot for Carlos’ own, that the skin just below his ear is the perfect place for Carlos to rest his lips. Carlos slides a hand beneath Cecil’s shirt to feel the rise and fall of his breathing, and to the steady drum of Cecil’s heartbeat beneath his palm he finally, finally, falls asleep.


	5. cacti

As a girl Josie perched on cacti, never minding the spines that caught in the thick wool sweep of her skirts. Dirt on the cracked leather of her boots and beneath the fingernails of her callused brown hands, and she’d grin down at the boys who came to call and she’d snap her gum and she’d say, “Come back later. I’m  _busy_.”

"Busy with what?" they’d yell, despair cracking so sweetly through their adolescent voices, and Josie would turn her face into the hot dry desert wind and open her arms to the sunset and  _laugh_ , and they’d be struck dumb at the sight of her: raven feathers fluttering in her hair, her shadow spilling and stretching and melting over the sands. Josie’s eyes were the sparkling black of the tiny juncos flitting beneath the sagebrush and the quick sharp gold of the hawks wheeling overhead, the silver of the full moon over a lake that only sometimes existed. Their love for her was fierce and without reservation, tinged with mild terror. Because Josie swung her hips when she walked and wore silver bracelets on her wrists, Josie perched on cacti and talked to the birds and the canyon and the winds. “So who wants to take me bowling?” she’d say, and when they tripped over themselves to be the one to offer the backseat of a motorcycle or an open car door, her laugh was wide and brilliant and encompassing as the night sky stretched overhead.

As a girl Josie perched on cacti, and she never gave thought to falling.


End file.
